Henry Kravis
Strategic Concepts & Mechanics
Primary Evidence
"The magazine The Institutional Investor is celebrating its fortieth anniversary, and the room is full of stars, some with a slightly dimmer shine than others. Among those seated are the then ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet, junk bond trader Michael Milken who was sentenced to prison for insider trading in the 1990s, as well as a number of heavyweight investors and finance people. During the dinner, one of the founders of the largest and first buyout firms, KKR’s Henry Kravis, stands up and gives a short speech. He talks about how his firm set the industry standard for fees in 1976. They didn’t really know what level to settle on, so they randomly chose to take 20 percent of the profit. — When I look back, you might as well have gotten 25 percent, he says with a laugh, directed at his colleagues."
"The Zlatan culture has elements of what KKR’s founder Henry Kravis describes when he says you have to be afraid, because “fear drives people to do great things.” The fear he’s talking about is the fear of not succeeding; you break boundaries to become a winner."
"The Zlatan culture has elements of what KKR’s founder Henry Kravis describes when he says you have to be afraid, because “fear drives people to do great things.” The fear he’s talking about is the fear of not succeeding; you break boundaries to become a winner."
"As we were bulking up, big, traditional, earnings-oriented media companies, including Westinghouse, Dow Jones, and American Express, were selling out. They learned that metropolitan areas were far more costly to wire, and residents could easily tune in broadcast channels in big cities. In 1988, we took aim at a target I had missed two years earlier, when Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), a big private equity firm, bought Storer Communications, the fourth-largest cable operator in the country, in a hostile leveraged buyout. Henry Kravis at KKR wasn’t a cable operator—they were financial investors betting on cable’s growth—and they had hit the timing just right."
"Forstmann Little entered the bidding. Teddy Forstmann was Henry Kravis’s strongest rival and most severe critic. If they went head-to-head on RJR, I knew it would be an all-out war."